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Wednesday, 9 July 2014

Intimacy of Crowds

The Intimacy of Crowds

by Michael Bond

Crowds aren’t really crazed – they are made of highly
co-operative individuals driven to shared interests and goals

There’s nothing like a riot to bring out the amateur
psychologist in all of us. Consider what happened in August 2011, after police
killed Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old man from the London suburb of Tottenham.
Thousands took to the streets of London and other English towns in the UK’s
worst outbreak of civil unrest in a generation. When police finally restored
order after some six days of violence and vandalism, everyone from the Prime
Minister David Cameron to newspaper columnists of every political persuasion
denounced the mindless madness, incredulous that a single killing, horrific as
it was, could spark the conflagration at hand. The most popular theory was that
rioters had surrendered their self-awareness and rationality to the mentality
of the crowd.

This has been the overriding view of crowd behaviour since
the French Revolution and the storming of the Bastille. The 19th-century French
criminologist Gabriel Tarde likened even the most civilised of crowds to ‘a
monstrous worm whose sensibility is diffuse and who still acts with disordered
movements according to the dictates of its head’. Tarde’s contemporary, the
social psychologist Gustave Le Bon, tried to explain crowd behaviour as a
paralysis of the brain; hypnotised by the group, the individual becomes the
slave of unconscious impulses. ‘He is no longer himself, but has become an
automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will,’ he wrote in 1895.
‘Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian… a
grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.’

This is still the prevailing view of mob behaviour, but it
turns out to be wrong. In recent years, social psychologists have found that,
rather than surrendering rationality and self-awareness, people in crowds
define themselves according to who they are with at the time; their social
identity determines how they behave.

Stephen Reicher, a social psychologist at the University of
St Andrews, says this model of crowd behaviour fits every case of public
disorder in the past three decades where data have been collected. It also
squares with the most thorough investigation of urban unrest ever conducted:
the Kerner Commission report into the urban race riots in Los Angeles, Chicago,
Newark, and other US cities between 1965 and 1967. Perhaps the most serious of
these took place in Detroit in July 1967 after police raided an unlicensed bar
and hundreds of patrons and local residents gathered in the street to protest.
After more than four days of violence between the crowd and law enforcement,
there were 43 people dead, 1,189 people injured, and more than 2,000 buildings
destroyed.

The Kerner report concluded that the key factor behind the
unrest – the worst in US history since the Civil War – was widespread
deprivation within black communities. It noted that black people were twice as
likely as whites to be unemployed, and almost four times as likely to be living
in poverty. The report also pointed out that the typical rioter was better
educated than the average person in their communities, more socially integrated
and less likely to have a previous criminal record. ‘What the rioters appeared
to be seeking was fuller participation in the social order and the material
benefits enjoyed by the majority of American citizens,’ it concluded. ‘Rather
than rejecting the American system, they were anxious to obtain a place for
themselves in it.’

This sits neatly with Reicher’s theory, which holds that
people in crowds behave not with mindlessness or madness, but by co-operating
with those around them. They do not lose their heads but instead act with full
rational intent. In London, many (though not all) of the rioters were motivated
by a shared sense of grievance at how their communities had been treated by
police in the preceding months and years, in particular the frequency with
which young black men were being stopped and searched by police in the street
for no good reason. When the riot started, many individuals felt that, as
members of a dissatisfied group, they had a legitimate cause to join in.

Surprisingly, the model also explains why crowds in
emergency situations are disinclined to panic, putting them at higher risk.
When the hijacked planes hit the World Trade Center towers in New York on 11
September 2001, most of those inside procrastinated rather than heading for the
nearest exit. Even those who managed to escape waited an average of six minutes
before moving to the stairs. Some hung around for half an hour, awaiting more
information, collecting things to take with them, going to the bathroom,
finishing emails, or making phone calls.

Likewise, say researchers, passengers have died in accidents
because they just didn’t try to get out. Take the aircraft fire at Manchester
airport in the UK on 22 August 1985, when 55 people died because they stayed in
their seats amid the flames. John Leach, who studies disaster psychology at the
University of Oslo, says a shared state of bewilderment might be to blame.
Contrary to popular belief that crowds always panic in emergencies, large
groups mill around longer than small groups since it takes them more time to
come up with a plan.

The new understanding of crowd dynamics has helped
authorities in Europe rewrite the rules on crowd management. In emergencies,
individuals are encouraged to avoid the allure of complacency and think of an
escape plan. Likewise, many police forces are trained to adopt a more
sensitive, communicative approach to large crowds. If crowd behaviour stems
from the social norms of the majority rather than the actions of the criminal
few, then sending in the riot squad is likely to make things worse, because it
treats everyone as aggressors. Presumed aggressors will probably respond in
kind, and violence can spiral out.

These changes have been motivated largely by Clifford Stott,
a researcher at the University of Leeds. Stott has done most of his work by
embedding with crowds – especially with England football fans at away games –
and recording what they do. He has been present, Dictaphone in pocket, at some
of the most significant episodes of football violence involving England fans in
Europe, including the World Cup finals in Italy in 1990 and France in 1998. He
has little doubt that most football violence is best understood in terms of
broad group identities rather than mindless minions following a hooligan
minority. At the tournaments in Italy and France, for example, the vast
majority of England fans were peaceful at the start, but together changed their
tune when they began to feel that local police were targeting England
supporters in particular. By the same token, Scottish football fans rarely got
into trouble despite drinking heavily, since non-violence has become part of
their identity. By avoiding conflict, Scotland fans help differentiate
themselves from England fans, and even punish those within their ranks who get
aggressive.

Stott and his collaborators presented their research to the
Portuguese Public Security Police (PSP) before the European football
championships, scheduled for Portugal for the first time in 2004. They advised
the PSP to drop the riot-squad tactics used at most previous tournaments in
favour of a lower-profile, firm-but-friendly approach. The Portuguese were
receptive. They developed a training programme to ensure that all PSP officers
understood the theory and how to translate it into non-confrontational
policing. The result was an almost complete absence of disorder at England
games during Euro 2004.

Today, the social identity model of crowd behaviour is the
framework by which all Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) matches
in Europe are policed – though in Russia and in eastern Europe it is still only
sporadically applied. Stott is now working to take the model beyond football.
In 2009, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC), the UK’s
independent police inspectorate, asked him to write a report on applying crowd
psychology to public policing. HMIC adopted many of his recommendations, and
one outcome has been the creation of liaison units in London and elsewhere that
send officers in distinctive uniforms into protest crowds to establish contact
– not, as some activists suspect, to spy on them. Despite the credibility
problems suffered by London police in the wake of the 2011 riots, liaison
officers were used successfully around 50 times during the London 2012 Olympic
Games.

Years of field research have taught Stott, Reicher and other
social psychologists not only that mindless irrationality is rare within
crowds, but also that co-operation and altruism are the norm when lives are at
stake. When Islamic extremists detonated four bombs on London’s transport
system during the morning rush hour on 7 July 2005, killing 52 people and
injuring more than 770, there emerged many remarkable stories of helpful
behaviour amid the carnage and chaos. In the dark, soot-filled underground
tunnels, where hundreds were trapped with no way of knowing if they would be
rescued, there was little panic and a general sense that ‘we’re all in the same
boat together’, as one survivor put it.

At the University of Sussex, researchers led by the social
psychologist John Drury have coined the term ‘collective resilience’, an
attitude of mutual helping and unity in the midst of danger, to describe how
crowds under duress often behave. There are many documented examples of this.
In 2008, Drury’s team interviewed survivors of 11 tragedies from the previous
40 years, including the 1989 Hillsborough football stadium disaster when 96
Liverpool supporters died after being trapped in overcrowded pens, and the IRA
bombing that killed six outside Harrods in London in 1983. In each case, most
of Drury’s interviewees recalled feeling a strong sense of togetherness during
the crisis, and an inclination to help strangers. Without such co-operation,
the casualty rates could have been far higher, says Drury, who refers to crowds
as ‘the fourth emergency service’ – an attitude not often shared by police. In
Drury’s view, it is wrong-headed to blame crowd disasters on the behaviour of
the crowd. More often the real problem is poor organisation – too many people
in one place – or inadequate venue design.

Drury explains that a crisis, even a minor one such as a
train breaking down in a tunnel, creates a ‘psychological crowd’ out of what
was previously an aggregate of strangers. You suddenly share a common fate and
your sphere of interest ramps up from the personal to the group.

‘I think everyone
would accept that one had really gone beyond the definition of identifying the
person as a supporter of football,’ said a survivor of the Hillsborough
tragedy. ‘I don’t think anyone saw Liverpool fans and Notts Forest fans… People
stopped being supporters of a football team and were just people.’

This sense of communion and barriers being broken down is
one of the most widely reported crowd experiences. Psychological crowds are
often fulfilling and uplifting places to be. Interviewing people after the
Egyptian revolution in 2011, I often heard participants say that the days they
spent protesting in Cairo’s Tahrir Square were the best of times. ‘The
revolution was the greatest event I will live through in my life,’ the science
journalist Mohammed Yahia told me. ‘It was a piece of paradise,’ said Basem
Fathy, one of the youth organisers who helped coordinate the early protests.
‘No one thought whether you were Christian or Muslim, poor or rich.’

The Cairo-based journalist Ursula Lindsey remembers it like
this: ‘Once you saw that crowd, you just felt the tide was on your side. You
felt so right. It made people feel fantastic. People were high on it, seeing
they were part of such a big group. It was an endless, mind-opening, affirming
experience. You saw the evaporation of fear, this elation, because so many
people were with you. Those 18 days brought out the best in people. People gave
the best versions of themselves.’

The idea that in crowds we might give the best versions of
ourselves runs counter to the common view that has prevailed since the French
Revolution. Yet it has science on its side: from the cohesion of football
crowds to the altruism of disaster victims and the solidarity of
revolutionaries, the evidence for the sanity and intimacy of crowds has become
overwhelming.

about me

A new counter-culture is now spreading across the planet, a movement dedicated to protesting at the outlandish behaviour of the control freaks, with their surveillance, eavesdropping, secrecy and lies. Their greed and belligerent sabre rattling and their industries of war. The dream is to replace these sociopaths with Love!

I wish this blog to be a small part of this - We must be the change.

We will be set to task to rebuild our world and our planet from centuries of decimation and destruction brought on by the fallacy, the belief that we once tragically and collectively embraced thousands of years ago – the mistaken notion that we are separate from one another and everything else on the planet and in the universe. We will finally recognize that the truth is just the opposite – we are all one with everything on the planet and in the universe. We are spiritual beings, infinite consciousness simply having a human experience, and as soon we come to fully recognize and understand this, it will then finally be time for us to fly – to shine in all of our infinite, glorious possibility...